This Week in Dumbphuckery

Welcome to Dumbphuckery, a lovely little town occupied by morons, racists, hypocrites, assholes and innocent victims of the aforementioned. Let's take a walk down Main Street and see what we can see.

There's Anthony Saenz, a 6-year-old boy suspended for toy gun at school because the Nerf gun violated the school's zero tolerance policy for weapons. Only thing is that a Nerf gun isn't a weapon, its a toy. I could do far more damage to someone with a rolled up magazine then I could with a Nerf gun. Anthony's been given a one-day suspension by the bureaucrats in his school system. Did I mention the kid is six? WTF? Zero tolerance should not resolve to zero intellect.

Planning is Stewpid

Last week and the two final days of the week before were spring break in my school district where I work. The district offices were blissfully quiet and empty and I was able to get a bunch of work done which was nice.

Fast forward to today and there is construction or something going on in the building which requires them to cut into the walls every couple of minutes. The noise and vibration are echoing through the offices and are incredibly loud, distracting and annoying.

This work could have and should have been done last week when it would have been least disruptive. But no, they are doing it now and driving me and everyone else in a hundred foot radius up a tree with the non-stop noise.

Sometimes I do wish I was working for a company that needed to do things efficiently and smartly. This bureaucratic education stuff can get old because of the built-in dumbassery.

Outrageous News

School spies on kids via webcam and spyware in their own homes. Which raises a pretty serious question: What if they captured video of a child undressing? Wouldn't that immediately make them child pornographers? This is beyond stupid and enters the realm of Epic 'Tardedness.

Oh, and it gets worse. The explanation from the school was that the webcam software was for theft recovery purposes only. However, the program was uncovered when a student was disciplined for conduct observed via the spyware webcam. And what was the student disciplined for doing? Eating Mike & Ike candies. The school official thought the Mike & Ikes were pills. But, if the purported only use of the webcam software was for theft recovery and the student in question obviously hadn't stolen his own computer then the school district is blowing bullshit smoke.

You can't cover up a stupid lie with another stupid lie especially when the pre-existing facts completely obliterate your stupid lie.

Someone is going to go down for this. And they damned well should. If I had a teenage kid who might have been spied on by the school, I'd be speaking to my lawyer and planning to sue that district into oblivion.

The Nightmare That Is The EDD

I got laid off from the school district more than a month ago, actually almost six weeks ago now. I have yet to get a single unemployment check from the EDD despite the fact that I registered the day I was laid off. I got a bunch of paperwork to fill out, I got a phone interview scheduled (a month after I filed my claim) that lasted all of two minutes, and now, when I call in to check the status of my claim, having to redial at least six or eight times to get through, I stumble through their stupid maze of a phone tree only to find out that no goddamned check has been cut yet.

The most annoying part of all of this is that it is all but impossible to get a live person on the phone. There's the automated useless-info line that's always busy and gives no useful info. Then there's the main line where you have to navigate another annoying phone tree system that threatens to disconnect you if you try to jump ahead and requires you to listen to the same bullshit time-wasting messages before being allowed to try and connect with a live person.

Only, and here's the truly infuriating part of it, you're told there might be a lengthy wait and then immediately told that there are too many other people already waiting and you have to try again later. Then the fucking computer hangs up on you.

I have yet to get to a live person to find out what the fuck is going on and where is my goddamned unemployment check and why in the fuck it has taken so ridiculously goddamned long to get me some damned money and that I had damned well better be getting checks for all the fucking weeks I've been off work since I filed for unemployment immediately after getting laid off specifically to avoid getting stuck six weeks later still waiting for some assistance.

I'd trade each of those checks for a chance to kick Governor Meathead right in his shriveled up steroid drained nuts. Maybe not all of them but at least a couple of them.

Here are some ways to improve the "service":
1. Hire more people to help man the phones. A thousand would help.
2. Cut down on the forced messaging. I know them by heart and it is incredibly irritating to be forced to listen to them each time.
3. Recognize that people need to be able to get through to a live person to sort out their claims. There is simply no possible way that there can be too many people calling all day everyday to keep the phones blocked up from the start of the day to the close.
4. Send me my damned check. I got laid off fair and square from my job, I paid my UI dues while I had my job, at this point the state is engaging in fraud for taking my money and not paying me my benefits. I'm tempted to sue.

The whole thing is one giant stinking clusterfuck of bureacratic asshattery and I'm thoroughly sick of it. I cannot wait until our Kyani business takes off enough so that we no longer need to rely on the state for anything whatsoever. Because they can't seem to find their own asses these days.

Odd Payments, or The Customer is NOT Always Right

Years ago when I still owned and rode a Kawasaki Concours (that's a ZG1000 for you non-Americans), I was also a member of the Concours Owners Group, or COG. It was an email group and generally a good lot of people. You could get tips on how to fix, modify or otherwise make your bike more like what you wanted/needed.

Because my Concours suffered severe injury when an uninsured, unlicensed illegal immigrant made an illegal left turn in front of me and I catapulted up and over his car, I was parting out the remaining parts on the email list. I'd done it before to good effect with another Concours (what can I say, I had a thing for huge honking shaft drive Jap bikes).

In the course of parting out the bike, I made what seemed like a simple request to potential buyers to help me keep track of who wanted what. It was that they put the part they wanted in the subject line of the emails they were sending to me. Because it is damned annoying and tedious to go through several dozen emails to discover what each person wanted.

And, for the most part, the buyers were good about doing it. But there are always a few people that either don't read the request or just ignore it. And one person in particular was obstinate about not doing this small thing to make keeping orders straight much easier on me. Even after several direct requests, he refused to submit his email with the parts he wanted in the subject line.

So I posted an email to the entire group, probably a bad idea, and pointed him out as being the exact opposite of what I was asking for, definitely a bad idea but I was aggravated.

That email touched off a shitstorm of a debate about how the customer is always right, no matter what. Which is, of course, utterly ridiculous.

My counter example to their argument was: What if someone wants to pay you in sand? What if someone wants to pay you in eyelashes? What if the customer wants to trade you massages for your product? I mistakenly thought that these clear examples of when the customer isn't right would resolve the dispute. But they did not.

I still stand by my original argument that the customer isn't always right, heck, the customer is rarely right. In fact, it is a marketing slogan that the customer is always right, only people don't seem to grasp that. Yes, businesses wouldn't exist without customers to buy goods and services. Yes, customers are the lifeblood of the economy and they propel the movement of money through the financial strata. But that doesn't mean that they are perfect or infallible and to think otherwise is just plain stupid.

Payments aren't generally negotiable unless the deal is a barter or trade and then they are wide open to negotiation and/or haggling.

In the end, I quit the group because of the constant sniping and harping. And parted out the rest of the bike on Ebay and made more money because there wasn't any owner's group discount in the pricing.

Bad Drivers in Company Vehicles

I don't understand people who drive company vehicles with the company's name plastered on the side and a sticker on the back that says "How am I driving? Call 1 800-Ima-Jerk to report bad driving" along with an identifying number and they drive like completely assholes.

Do they really expect that cutting people off and driving big pick up trucks like sports cars isn't going to result in people dropping a dime on them? Or do they just not give a damn about getting yapped at for being assholes on the road?

In today's economy with record layoffs all over the place and a market flooded with qualified and eager workers, wouldn't it make sense to do everything in your power to keep your job? I.e. don't behave like a douchebag on the road?

My guess is that they don't think they are driving like jerks or they don't think people will call them on it. But if you cut me off and I've got some way to bring a little smackdown on you for doing it, you can rest assured that I'll be dialing your company up in a heartbeat.

Why can't people drive with some manners?

More Local Douchebaggery

Burglars strike three schools and don't really steal too much, they just broke some windows, sprayed fire extinquishers and drank a bunch of soda. They did steal a computer from a reading resource room though so it wasn't all fun and games.

The thing of it is, these schools are already way underwater in terms of budget and they really don't have a spare chunk of cash to repair the damage and buy a replacement computer.

I would guess this was perpetrated by some teenagers just looking to cause some trouble but I don't really care, you break into a school and vandalize it or steal from it and you might as well get "LOSER" tattooed on your forehead. You're a walking turd and the sooner you get caught for some crime and sentenced to a long stay in the pokey, the better. They probably won't get busted for this annoying and lame crime but its a pretty good bet that they commit other limp crimes in addition to these.

The upside is that some of the employees in the district are looking into ways to get them a replacement computer from some of the other schools, mine included. I've requested permission to send over one of our spares that has been in the lab awaiting re-imaging and am hopeful that they will get more than just the one or two from my school.

I Just Don't Get It

I'm a combination of confused and seriously pissed off right now. Which is a bummer because I was very excited when I got home for lunch to see that Fed-Ex had dropped off a box for me. The box contained a new (to me, it is used) telephoto zoom lens for my Rebel XTi. I was really happy that it came so quickly especially since there are some upcoming cyclocross races that I wanted to try and take some photos at.

Only my elation turned to disappointment and outright rage when I unwrapped the lens. One, no lens cover which is just stupid.
Two, no clear lens protecting filter on the end. Cheap insurance.
Three, a rather large abrasion scratch on the outer lens next to a decent sized scratch. Not dead center but pretty impossible to not have known it was there when the seller sold it.

Which means he knew that he was selling pretty obviously damaged goods to me. Why? Why would you sell someone they were going to be pissed off about and demand compensation? Did he somehow think I wouldn't notice it? Did he presume that I would be cool with it and just let him off for selling me a lens that is, presently, useless?

It is fixable and I'm going to a local camera shop after work to see about getting it fixed up. But I shouldn't have to, I shouldn't have to waste my time getting the lens into a usable state. I know I'm for damned sure not going to be paying for it out of my pocket. The sale was through Amazon so I fully expect that I'll get some cash back to cover my work to get it repaired.

I just can't access the mentality that allowed him to knowingly pack up and ship obviously defective merchandise.

I've already emailed him and put the ball in his court to give him the opportunity to make this right. I'm not overly hopeful of an easy resolution but I have to give him the chance. And, when he disappoints some more, I will escalate the claim through Amazon's channels to recoup the cost it will take to fix the lens.

Update 1/7/09: The seller has been in touch with me, has been genuinely (or does a great job faking it) apologetic and already refunded my money before I even got the package in the mail on the way back to him. I have also ordered a brand new lens and got a $30 discount on it by opening up an Amazon credit card account. The credit card has a ridiculously high interest rate but it won't matter because the lens will be fully paid off before any interest is applied and then I don't plan on ever using the card again. All's well that ends well, now I just have to wait for the brand new lens to show up.

I did take the lens into a repair shop to get an idea of how much it would cost to repair and the lady was said "Don't bother, just get your money back," which is never a good sign. Anyway, I'm not thrilled but I am satisfied.

You Got Your Stupid In My Penis Extension

If Jesse James drove a Hummer... then you can bet he wouldn't have been retarded enough to put old wooden wagon wheels on it and call it "Art".

It would have been more art-like (or is that art-esque?) to make its tires out of little green Army Men. At least that would have been a statement that made the slightest bit of sense.

Actually, it would have been more of a statement to put the Hummer's wheels on an actual horse drawn wagon. Maybe even some spinners for the bling-bling-I'm-an-idiot effect.

Disgruntled

This might not make a whole lot of sense, it doesn't to me, but just try to nod along every so often and maybe it'll magically end up at something resembling an understanding.

So I just had my five month review, supposedly two months after I'd become a permanent employee with six months of service. Did that make sense? Maybe not. Let me slow down a moment.

I was hired on a full-time basis by the school district on the 5th of February. Previous to this, I'd been a temp. According to my obviously flawed mathematical reasoning, six months after February 5th is July 5th but via the use of the maddeningly obtuse bureaucratic mathematics, six months after February 5th is November 1st.

Does that make the slightest bit of sense to you because it doesn't make any sense to me at all.

What it breaks down to is six months of work is 130 working days. I need to go back through my calendar and see exactly how it really breaks down but, how I see it, the district gets an extra three months of keeping me at a lower pay scale through some creative accounting.

And, in the process, they have gone a long way to convincing me that I need to ramp up and turbo-size and afterburner-ize and supercharge my job hunt for a real job without the stupid ass bullshit bureaucratic hoops to bash up against.

In addition to all of this, I found out that I'm not allowed to take the after hours support job at one of the other schools because of union and payroll problems. It is actually illegal (not sure if that's law or union laws) for a school to hire me as a contractor for the same position I currently hold. Which is, to say, I am unable to earn additional money on my free time.

To call me a disgruntled and pissed off drone is massive understatement.

The problem with all of this is that the bureaucracy tends to weed out better employees through the application of stupid policies like these. Because a better employee has more options available to them and crappier employees do not. Once a crappy employee is entrenched in their position, they are all but impossible to remove and all but impossible to get them to do their job effectively because they have no incentive to do so. They get paid almost no matter what they do even if what they do is absolutely nothing at all.

However, in a depressed economy, decent jobs are harder to come by and the competition for them is substantially harder. But something in this situation has got to give, I just hope it isn't my sanity.

When The Illiterate Name Children

I get the desire to have a unique name, I get the desire to carve out a little specialness for each child because each child is special and unique and awesome unto themselves.

However, there are some issues I have with people naming their children names that they don't really know how to spell. There should be a requirement to be able to spell a name properly before you are allowed to use it to name your kid.

I mean, seriously, did the parents of one student at my school actually intend on giving their child the middle name of Annn? What about the proud parents of Jonahtan (yes, that's Jonah-tan)? Or what about the boy who's middle name is Joesph?

The world is in dire need of a spell check.

And, almost forgot, please do not ever name your kid after the kind of car you want, most especially if you aspire to own a Chevy or Hyundai. Or a city, unless its something cool like Biloxi or Mississuaga, not Paris or anything lame like that. Your cooperation is appreciated by both me and your offspring who will be less likely to get beat up for having a stupid name.

File Under: You Got Your Stupid in My Business Plan

Techdirt: ABC Still Excited About DVRs That Disable Fast Forward despite the patent fact that NOBODY will buy a DVR with a basic feature disabled when the next model on the shelf does not have that basic feature disabled. DUH!

How do they figure on penetrating the market with these crippled machines? By force and legislation. And that works really, really well in a free market economy.

Besides, is there anything worth watching on ABC anyway? I can't think of anything at all on the station much less something worth watching.

Way to push yourself to the margins, ABC.

Dumbass Busted Job Sites

So I was applying for yet another job this morning. The site set off alarm bells pretty early on and they just got louder and louder until the stupid thing just stopped functioning.

One, they required the use of Internet Explorer. That's incredibly stupid and annoying. The world does not use one browser and building your site for just one tells me that you're lazy.

Two, the Home and About Us "links" weren't links, they were static text on the page.

Three, a total lack of contact information on the site.

Four, even when I did use IE (on my wife's computer as I refuse to keep that shit browser on my machine) the site still stopped working properly and there was no way to tell them or let them know.

So, yeah, Impact Resource Group. The "impact" you made on me is that you're a lame company who did just barely enough to get the site set up and, theoretically, running.